Play audio snippet via nRF51/52

[Frits Jan]

I am working on a device which also needs to give audio feedback to the user. The app on the mobile phone needs to send a wav (or similar) file (mono, speech) to the device and the device needs to play it through a small speaker.

Is this possible with the nRF51/52 and if so can you direct me in what is needed for it to get it working (DAC, amplifier, how to transfer the data, (external)buffer/memory needed, etc?)

Thanks in advance!

[JohnBrown]

I believe it would be possible to play a basic sound on the nRF51 using PWM via the on-chip timers, but not while the soft device is running( I say this having successfully generated DTMF tones via PWM). I also believe I have read stuff recently relating to timeslots being available between SD operations, so I guess if your sound sample was very short, it might be possible.

[Frits Jan]

So the main problem would be timing issues because the SOC is busy with BT handling? In my case I first wanted to get the wav data from the mobile phone onto the device and then play it. But now I am looking into putting all wav files I need on an SD card and then just get a trigger message over BT to play a certain file. Let's say the wav file is 1 minute long, would this be a problem? Or can this run in a separate process so I can still connect to the device via BLE to control it? (I am talking about SPI interface now not PWM).